Education Act 1851 cuts government funds to church schools in South Australia; fulfils ideal for founding province
A schoolroom behind Trinity (now Holy Trinity) Anglican church (pictured around 1870) on North Terrace, Adelaide city, was the start of what became St Peter's Collegiate at Hackney.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
The South Australia government's 1851 Education Act reinforced one of the province's basic founding tenets: separating church from state.
In 1851, South Australia became the first province in the British empire to cut off state aid to any education group linked to a church or sectarian belief. This ended the limited funds given by the South Australian government since 1847 to church schools.
The 1851 Act created a central board of education to license and to continue to give funds to non-sectarian community groups wanting to building and improve low-fee schools for the lower and middle classes.
This board also licensed “efficient” teachers and added to their salaries that mainly came from fees paid by parents. There were 132 schools licensed by the board in 1854 but a shortage of teachers remained chronic. But teachers were poorly paid, lacked training and support, and inspection standards were questioned.
The 1851Act didn’t make school attendance compulsory and, in Adelaide's poorer sections and rural areas, children went to school when parents could afford it or when they weren’t needed to help at the house or farm.
Despite the government funding cuts, churches – Anglicans, Lutherans, Dissenters and Catholics – became the leading educational agencies in South Australia. They provided teachers and schoolrooms but, through services, sermons in their schools, aimed to consolidate their own communities. The wealthy could also provide their children’s education with tutors and governesses.
Private, including Catholic, schools would not get state aid, via the federal government, again until the 1960s.
Government funding of education continued to be mired in debates about the triumph of intrusive central governments over local control, state-supported Protestantism over Catholics, bringing unruly or working class under state paternalism, and oppressing Aboriginal children and families.
